The roots of Lisp


The roots of Lisp article was written back in 2002 by Paul Graham, it mainly discuss how John McCarthy started working with operations and notations that would eventually become ‘Lisp’, which is the abbreviation of List Processing,

According to the article, Lisp was created following the rules of John McCarthy, right at Lisp, we have seven ‘primitive’ operators: quote, atom, eq, car, cons, cond and cdr, all these together are the reason why the writer mentions that Lisp writes itself, the programming makes the program, as obvious as it might sound, the background of the true meaning is much deeper, in Lisp functions are expressed with parameters and expressions.

Paul Graham assures that the only two consistent programming languages have been C and Lisp, also assuring that on the next (at least back then) twenty years all the programming languages would have taken Lisp and C as their core models or bases and just adding new functions or qualities, and it has been true.

The most powerful function inside Lisp is ‘eval’, with this particular function, anyone can create a new programming language (this is what he was referring when mentioning that lisp can be written by itself), this is caused due to one of the most used tools of a language: recursion, which has made Lisp so powerful and understandable (on its own way).

The autor is really clear when mentioning that functional programming languages would be the next big thing, although, I do agree in the qualities of the functional paradigm, I truly believe that OOP languages are still on the top of the chain, mostly because of the requirements that software brings, I believe the only way which functional programming could take the throne is if they make them a lot more readable (Clojure is not that hard though), this is due to the constant growth of technology and the new era of digitalization, where almost everyone will be required to have certain knowledge about this subject.


Article: P. Graham (2002). The Roots of Lisp. Recovered from http://34.212.143.74/s201913/tc2006/roots_of_lisp.pdf

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